This invention pertains to wireless networking systems and, more particularly, to a wireless network access point which minimizes the performance impact of 802.11g clients in the presence of mixed in 802.11g/802.11b traffic by sequestering wireless network traffic based on protocol.
Within the past two decades, the development of raw computing power coupled with the proliferation of computer devices has grown at exponential rates. This phenomenal growth, along with the advent of the Internet, has led to a new age of accessibility to other people, other systems, and to information.
The simultaneous explosion of information and integration of technology into everyday life has brought on new demands for how people manage and maintain computer systems. The demand for information technology professionals is already outpacing supply when it comes to finding support for someone to manage complex, and even simple computer systems. As access to information becomes omnipresent through personal computers, hand-held devices, and wireless devices, the stability of current infrastructure, systems, and data is at an increasingly greater risk to suffer outages. This increasing complexity, in conjunction with a shortage of skilled information technology professionals, points towards an inevitable need to automate many of the functions associated with computing today.
Autonomic computing is one proposal to solve this technological challenge. Autonomic computing is a concept to build a system that regulates itself much in the same way that a person's autonomic nervous system regulates and protects the person's body.
Within the past decade, there has been accelerated growth in portable computing to meet the demands of a mobile workforce. This voluminous mobile workforce has traditionally relied on a cable connection to a backbone network in order to have access to resources such as printers, e-mail servers, databases, storage, and even Internet connections. Within the past few years alone, the industry has seen rapid deployment of wireless local area networks which offer increased convenience over cable connections to backbone networks. In addition to convenience, wireless networks offer the ability to roam while maintaining a network connection.
Recently, a standard for wireless local area networks known as the IEEE 802.11 standard has been adopted and has gained acceptance among the industrial, scientific and medical communities. The IEEE 802.11 standard for wireless networks is a standard for systems that operate in the 2,400-2,483.5 MHz industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) band. The ISM band is available worldwide and allows unlicensed operation of spread spectrum systems. The IEEE 802.11 RF transmissions use multiple signaling schemes (modulations) at different data rates to deliver a single data packet between wireless systems.
In a wireless local area network, wireless clients obtain access to resources on the backbone network through the use of an access point. The backbone network is typically on a wired network, such as ethernet, but can also be a second wireless network or any combination thereof. When an access point provides connectivity to resources directly on a wired network, the access point will contain, amongst other things, a wired LAN interface, a bridge function, and a wireless LAN interface in order to bridge traffic between the wireless network and the wired network.
Most installations use wireless local area networks as an overlay to an existing ethernet (cabled or wired) network which serves as a backbone or provides access to a backbone and its resources. Typically, access points are provided at various locations to create continuous geographical coverage for the wireless network. Since 802.11 is limited to 30 meters in range and Ethernet is physically limited to 100 meters in length, office environments typically deploy several access points on different backbones. The various wireless access points are assigned to different wireless frequency spectra or channels to allow overlap between wireless ranges.
802.11b is a popular IEEE wireless networking standard that has emerged and provides the aforementioned advantages. The new standard, 802.11g, is emerging which provides the advantages of 802.11b at a higher throughput which is on the order of ethernet wired local area network speed. As currently defined, 802.11g networks are backward compatible to 802.11b networks.
A problem exists, however, in that 802.11b traffic severely impacts 802.11g performance. 802.11b impacts performance of an 802.11g network because 802.11b clients are not able to recognize 802.11g traffic which follows the standard CSMA/CA physical carrier-sense protocol to avoid collisions. To subjugate this limitation, 802.11b clients must utilize a request to send/clear to send (RTS/CTS) virtual carrier-sense protocol to avoid collisions and to gain access to the channel for transmission. With only a few 802.11b users on an access point that supports both 802.11g and 802.11b traffic, overall throughput degrades such that any performance benefit of 802.11g disappears.
A challenge found, however, is in mitigating the impact introduced to one protocol from another protocol on the same access point according to autonomic computing principles.